Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

We then asked what moved those birds to be thus continually
chanting and singing. He answered that it was
the bells that hung on the top of their cages.
Then he said to us, Will you have me make these monk-hawks
whom you see bardocuculated with a bag such as you
use to still brandy, sing like any woodlarks?
Pray do, said we. He then gave half-a-dozen
pulls to a little rope, which caused a diminutive
bell to give so many ting-tangs; and presently a parcel
of monk-hawks ran to him as if the devil had drove
’em, and fell a-singing like mad.

Pray, master, cried Panurge, if I also rang this bell
could I make those other birds yonder, with red-herring-coloured
feathers, sing? Ay, marry would you, returned
Aedituus. With this Panurge hanged himself (by
the hands, I mean) at the bell-rope’s end, and
no sooner made it speak but those smoked birds hied
them thither and began to lift up their voices and
make a sort of untowardly hoarse noise, which I grudge
to call singing. Aedituus indeed told us that
they fed on nothing but fish, like the herns and cormorants
of the world, and that they were a fifth kind of cucullati
newly stamped.

He added that he had been told by Robert Valbringue,
who lately passed that way in his return from Africa,
that a sixth kind was to fly hither out of hand, which
he called capus-hawks, more grum, vinegar-faced, brain-sick,
froward, and loathsome than any kind whatsoever in
the whole island. Africa, said Pantagruel, still
uses to produce some new and monstrous thing.

Chapter 5.IV.

How the birds of the Ringing Island were all passengers.

Since you have told us, said Pantagruel, how the pope-hawk
is begot by the cardin-hawks, the cardin-hawks by
the bish-hawks, and the bish-hawks by the priest-hawks,
and the priest-hawks by the clerg-hawks, I would gladly
know whence you have these same clerg-hawks.
They are all of them passengers, or travelling birds,
returned Aedituus, and come hither from t’other
world; part out of a vast country called Want-o’-bread,
the rest out of another toward the west, which they
style Too-many-of-’em. From these two
countries flock hither, every year, whole legions of
these clerg-hawks, leaving their fathers, mothers,
friends, and relations.

This happens when there are too many children, whether
male or female, in some good family of the latter
country; insomuch that the house would come to nothing
if the paternal estate were shared among them all (as
reason requires, nature directs, and God commands).
For this cause parents use to rid themselves of that
inconveniency by packing off the younger fry, and
forcing them to seek their fortune in this isle Bossart
(Crooked Island). I suppose he means L’Isle
Bouchart, near Chinon, cried Panurge. No, replied
t’other, I mean Bossart (Crooked), for there
is not one in ten among them but is either crooked,
crippled, blinking, limping, ill-favoured, deformed,
or an unprofitable load to the earth.